My friend Kate knew just where to take us to dinner when we visited. The exterior of the Governor Francis Inn in Warwick, Rhode Island didn’t convey much. But when we stepped inside surrounded by wood paneling and golden lighting, I felt like I’d been here a hundred times before. A stone-clad gas fireplace in the corner added to the ambiance. We settled into a half-booth, upholstered in a vintage floral straight out of an 80s hotel room.
Most importantly, we achieved our quest for the day and ate some damn clam cakes.
Kate had informed me well before our visit that I needed to eat a clam cake, and so, as we spent a day meandering in Providence, we stopped by two different places. Our timing was off and both were closed.
But no matter: Clam cakes and chowder were on the menu for dinner. I expected something like a hush puppy but instead, I was greeted with a light and fluffy interior, more like a funnel cake with little bits of clam throughout.
I’ve thought of those clam cakes from time to time in the months since our vacation. Because here in Maryland, there’s nothing quite like them. And because of the wisdom of bringing your out-of-town friends not to some novel foodie destination, but to your mainstay; take them to the place you go to all the time.
Clam Cakes and Chowder at the Governor Francis Inn
But the book is more than recipes. A history of clam cakes traces them back further than I’d have expected – well into the 1800s. And the pancake-like clam cakes of Maryland and Virginia make an appearance, with a sideline into Mrs. Kitching and Smith Island Cake. The little town of Saxis Virginia is represented, and the Chincoteague Firemen’s Carnival. Up and down the shore, people have found ways to stretch the flavor of clams into cakes and fritters.
Wyman’s book also includes a guide to clam cake and fritter destinations. Next time I find myself in Rhode Island, I have even more options to look into. One could even take a bike tour of clam cake establishments, with a stop for ice cream.
I interviewed Wyman about the book, and I made the classic clam cake recipe found in the book.
Laurie Boucher told me that she always knew she wanted to study law. The vocation brought her from Pennsylvania to Baltimore, where she now resides. When Boucher needed more time to take care of family, she scaled back on lawyering, enrolled in culinary school, and began to master the art of pasta-making. As she shared her pasta creations on instagram, along with detailed information and instructions, she began to acquire a few thousand enthusiastic followers. At some point I became one of them!
Laurie’s instagram is a well of inspiration to try new things and to have fun. It’s even resulted in her offering some pasta classes. I knew that meeting Laurie would be a great way to get back into doing some interviews for Old Line Plate and I knew I could not turn down an opportunity to learn the technique of laminating herbs into fresh pasta. Problem is, I was a little intimidated. How could I keep up with a lawyer whose idea of relaxation was to spend so many dedicated hours mastering intricate techniques?
When I stepped into Boucher’s kitchen, stocked with tools for pasta and more, I was instantly put at ease. Yes, I met a highly driven and self-disciplined person. What I found beyond that was someone a lot like me – a person whose self-driven need to follow a passion on one’s own terms has allowed them to share information freely; a fellow introvert who has found that food can be a way to reach out and connect with others – even online.
One of the most vivid descriptions of the joys of foraging for wild food was written by Edna Lewis in “In Pursuit of Flavor,” the 1988 follow-up to her influential book “The Taste of Country Cooking.” She wrote in the present tense about the tastes from her childhood in Freetown, Virginia, where both cultivated and wild land offered sensory delight:
“Beyond the garden is the orchard… and beyond the orchard are the fields and woods, where wild things grow – watercress, mushrooms, strawberries, blackberries, grapes, and nuts. Perhaps it is because of the natural, undisturbed compost that nurtures them year after year, or perhaps it is because they grow only where the soil, light and humidity are right for them, but wild things never fail us. They always taste good, which is why if you see only a handful of wild nuts or a cupful of berries, you should pick them. They have a flavor nothing else has. If you transplant a wild plant to the garden it will never taste the same.”
The impact of having been raised in an environment that was both psychologically and physically nurturing stayed with Lewis. As one of the first evangelists of the value of farm-to-table food, Lewis’ relationship to food defined a philosophy for a faction of chefs, diners and home cooks who have sought to question the wisdom of the industrial agriculture era.
To many people, the question of whether an urban environment can incorporate the kind of nurturing qualities found in a rural farming community doesn’t seem worth asking. Cities have been notoriously depleted and toxified by centuries of industry. In Baltimore, the very walls and pipes have poisoned generations of children. For many, urban environments are not only not nurturing – they are hostile.
Nonetheless, a growing number of public health and municipal planning professionals have taken notice of the foragers who do venture into city parks, highway medians or grassy lots to gather edible plants and fungus that most people don’t even know are there.
Baltimore is sometimes pulled into these conversations by chance. The Center for a Livable Future (CLF) at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health is located here, and naturally their initial research often gathers data locally.
In December 2017, they released the findings of a study done in a partnership with the US Forest Service. “Researchers surveyed 105 foragers in Baltimore to get data on: forager demographics; commonly-foraged foods; the locations of foraging activities; motivations for and barriers to foraging; and the contribution of foraged materials to foragers’ diets.”
I was one of the participants of this study. The results have given context beyond the anecdotal about who else is “out there,” gathering in Baltimore, what they are gathering, and why. Most, like me, are white women in their mid-thirties. Most have a college degree and earn 20-40k in annual income. The average years of foraging experience is less than five. Foragers reported gathering “a diverse array of plant and fungal materials which, in some cases, constituted an important fraction of an individual’s overall diet. Despite this,” the report notes, “foraging remains largely unrecognized in urban policy, planning, and design, except where prohibited by regulations governing public parks and other green spaces.”
Field Guide to Edible Wild Plants: the book that started my foraging fascination
Researching the history of foraging is an exercise in futility. Where a behavior was once a normal part of survival, it’s not worth writing too much about in books or newspapers. The term “gathering” was more commonly used until the last few decades. What is easier to find is the *decline* of foraging. Old newspapers would occasionally mention unfortunate people who picked the wrong mushroom, but there were no forceful admonitions. In 1894 the Baltimore Sun reported that edible mushrooms were growing abundantly that September but that “it requires an experienced person to distinguish them from the poisonous toadstools.”
Nearly a century later, in 1958, the Hagerstown Daily Mail printed a column by a Dr. Van Dallen entitled “How to Keep Well.” His first advice on how to keep well? “Don’t gather mushrooms…. Even the experts have been known to make mistakes,” the doctor wrote.
It would seem that the popularity of foraging waned until its resurgence in the 1990s, but it never fully went away.
In 1998, one of the first ever studies of urban foraging was conducted right in Baltimore by the now-defunct Community Resources, Inc, “a nonprofit organization promoting community stewardship to restore our urban environment.”
The results are fascinating. Forester Paul Jahnige observed a diverse array of people collecting edible and medicinal items in the city parks. With Community Resources, he produced a paper filled with stories from actual foragers, including elderly African Americans who gathered poke greens, children shaking mulberries from city trees, and a Korean family who would make an annual trip to gather Chinese Chestnuts before cooking them at home, together. The paper determined that “urban forest product collectors come from a wide diversity of socio-economic, age, gender, and ethnic groups and institutions.”
They also determined that the needs and interest of these foragers was not considered before park planning decisions were made. The paper cites the proposed removal of the Chinese Chestnut trees for road-widening. While neighborhood residents, traffic engineers and park officials held many meetings about the project, “the collectors of these nuts were not even considered. They had no voice in the decision. Their use of the trees did not count.”
A lot has changed in the intervening years. Eric Kelly of Charm City Farms feels that Baltimore is doing more and more to encourage foraging and urban agriculture. “I think that they are [encouraging foraging] to a certain extent.” He cites Baltimore Housing’s Adopt-A-Lot program as one example. “You can get involved with Tree Baltimore, Parks and People and other non-profits [focused on] green space, and become part of that community and get involved with maintenance. They are open to conversations about how the areas are tended to.”
Charm City Farms conducts workshops on foraging itself as well as follow-up processes like making rope and processing acorns. At their farm and work-shed in Johntson Square, the concepts of urban versus rural sometimes collide in amusing and enlightening ways. Local teenagers stop by to marvel at the slabs of deer meat and discards, while survivalists-in-training from the suburbs make a show of nonchalance.
Starting friction fires and making your own ropes and acorn flour may be useful skills to have, but even Kelly doesn’t believe that foraging can truly provide enough food to live on. “It can round out a diet pretty well, and I wouldn’t expect to go out and get a full meal but what you’re going to get at a grocery store will never come close to the freshness and goodness of foraged foods.”
Nutrition may not be the most beneficial aspect of urban foraging at any rate. The family ties and connections to traditions first mentioned in Jahnige’s survey are a theme in subsequent studies, including the most recent one completed by The Center for a Livable Future. A 2013 study in Seattle asserted that “urban foraging maintains traditions and social ties while deepening connections with nature.”
Increasingly, municipalities are considering the benefit in allowing and even fostering these activities. The Seattle study conclusion stated that “seeking wild foods and medicines in the city can be seen as a way in which foragers assert their rights to the natural resources that support their wild food and health practices.”
Delving into issues of planning (or any issues, really) in Baltimore is particularly fraught. Any discussion is remiss without consideration of the racial inequality that is built into the very layout of the city. As (some of) Baltimore’s citizens and media have become increasingly interested in understanding this fact, professor Lawrence Brown has become a de-facto interpreter. His analysis of the segregation and the resources allocated to “The White L and the Black Butterfly” elevated the discussion in the wake of the 2015 unrest. I reached out to him to inquire whether seemingly trivial subjects like urban foraging have a place in the reparations of Baltimore’s segregationist culture and policies.
“Urban planning around increasing resources is always worthwhile for Black Butterfly neighborhoods. Baltimore Apartheid operates on a basis of segrenomics that Noliwe Rooks defines as ‘the business of profiting specifically from high levels of racial and economic segregation’ (from her book Cutting School) intentionally reduces access to resources and allows White neighborhoods to hoard them,” Brown says. “Certain environmental efforts may not be a priority in many Black Butterfly neighborhoods… where people are struggling to survive day-by-day. But they are worthwhile. The efforts to plant a garden or fruit trees should not be isolated or a one off project. They should be connected with pressing issues like providing employment or safe spaces or teaching children or reducing redlining.”
One study has pointed out, for instance, that access to park land in Baltimore is inequitable by race and income. Another obvious concern would be environmental contaminants, which often tend to make their way into the lands that disadvantaged people live and depend on, whether legally, by corrupt corporations, or just plain lack of sanitation services.
The Center for a Livable Future is planning to follow-up with further study of contamination concerns. Study co-author Keeve Nachman says “we needed to get an understanding of what foraged items people were most likely to consume and where they are getting them, since both of these are essential to know in order to try and make sense of whether exposures to these contaminants are of concern. It’s somewhat inevitable that exposures to contaminants are going to happen in the urban environment – the real question is whether or not the levels and timing of these exposures are concerning. Now that we know quite a bit about foraging patterns in Baltimore, further work will allow us to answer this question with a lot more confidence.”
As a lifelong forager in suburban and rural environments, the thought of toxins has passed my mind. As much as I love a good morel hunt, my favorite foraging memories involve gathering blackberries with my grandmother as the cars rushed by us on the highway. I wondered if I should worry about car exhaust, but the taste of a fresh ripe blackberry beat out my concerns.
As for foraging in the city, I once didn’t consider it an option. Then, in the mid-2000’s, I had a coworker, Aliza Sollins, who would come into our office in Bolton Hill with a bag full of edible items found in the nearby alleyways or overgrown hedges. Aliza’s connection with food systems eventually led her to a career gardening work with refugees and Baltimore children, tackling issues of education and food access. She is currently working at the community organization Annie E. Casey Foundation. She says “Foraging helps me to reconnect the idea of food as nature. It’s different than gardening because while gardening is something that humans must control and maintain, foraging something growing wild or that has gone feral… gives the sense that nature is enduring and abundant. …. foraging is definitely a nice starting point of intersection between connecting people to the plants around them. People tend to be more interested in a plant if it can be of value to them in some way.”
Aliza told me she always felt appeal in possessing the knowledge and ability to forage for food, but echoed Kelly’s opinion that urban foraging is impractical as a large component of anyone’s diet: “Foraging is also not a good way to ACTUALLY survive unless you have a lot of land because it’s so hard to get enough calories from random plants, it more about the idea of survival…a sense of resilience.”
Adopt-A-Lot aside, Baltimore doesn’t tend to be very cutting edge about these types of things. That is part of the reason that this study’s Baltimore focus is exciting.
Inquiring about the intersections of the food waste and foraging studies presents some questions of interpretation. Nachman says, “On one hand, we could consider that all unforaged forageables in the urban environment are a form of wasted food… many of them are nutrient dense and pack a real punch when it comes to supplementing the diet. Thankfully, the environmental and public health consequences of wasting food in this context are negligible, as the inputs to production are virtually nonexistent (since many of these items are typically considered weeds). On the other hand, we have learned that there are very real concerns related to over-foraging; for example, with some species, there is a potential for harvesting to occur to such an extent that the plants won’t grow back, which have obvious negative consequences on food availability.”
Eric Kelly from Charm City Farms feels that “in [city] limits its especially beneficial to encourage foraging because we’re not disturbing a habitat or ecosystem… not one that’s not already ruined anyway… whereas parks in the county are very sensitive towards that kind of thing.”
The interchange between humans and plants in the city creates intriguing possibilities.
If you’re hiking through Leakin Park during a leafy time of year, there are moments you could forget you’re in the city. Franklintown Road winds around the south end of the park, largely quiet. The streams, ruins and recreational structures create intrigue scattered throughout the park. This remote feeling has enabled the conditions for Leakin Park’s notorious reputation. Longtime residents in the surrounding neighborhoods know the stories of the discarded bodies found in the park dating back to the 1940′s. Those stories were amplified by the Serial Podcast; now, people who couldn’t have named a Baltimore park make jokes about ‘the bodies.’
While outsiders and naysayers crack jokes, many citizens find respite within the city’s green spaces, reaping physical and mental health benefits in the process. Could foraging help repair the relationship Baltimore citizens have with this park?
Heide Grundmann from Friends of Leakin Park is aware of foraging activities in the park, but the park stewards are cautious to condone it. “in general the park system does not allow taking things from the park, excepting fallen acorns and similar fallen fruits. Over the years we have observed significant loss of habitat and wildlife due to climate change and overpopulation of deer, who eat young plants and undergrowth. It takes a well-informed person to forage carefully without causing detrimental effects on the area. During the October Mushroom Festival guided walks occur to teach mushroom identification.”
The CLF study may enable Baltimore to strike a balance. Marla Emery, the US Forestry Service researcher who collaborated on the study believes that it’s possible and worth pursuing. “As a scientist, in general, and a federal scientist in particular, it’s my job to provide information that will support land managers in making those sorts of decisions. Current strategies for managing hunting and fishing definitely provide potential models. In the not-too-distant future, we hope to convene a group of urban public land managers, non-governmental organizations, foragers, and researchers to review the state-of-the-knowledge about urban foraging and consider whether there might be a pathway to safe, sustainable foraging in parks and other city green spaces.”
Many ‘urban foragers,’ myself included, feel that foraging can have benefits beyond the free food. Increasingly, the studies seem to confirm this feeling.
Aliza puts it best:
“Foraging helps me feel more connected to the city because it helps you connect to secret, special spots (like the herbs growing at the base of the statue in Mt. Royal!). It makes you value public space. It’s funny because when I was in Kentucky, you would think that there is so much land to access there, but really most of the land is other people’s property unless you go to a big state park. I realized that Baltimore is so special because there are so many shared small public spaces. The city’s vacant lot adoption program is really special.
Staying connected to nature as the source of food is really powerful, and also helps to maintain honor for our bodies and the earth.”
Abby Fisher’s 1881 book of recipes opens with an apology. Unable to read or write, the former slave and accomplished Southern cook apparently felt uneasy about producing the cookbook that was so often requested of her. Never mind that her contemporaries – such as Mrs. B. C. Howard and Mrs. Charles H. Gibson – didn’t express concerns about filling their books with copied and untested recipes, not to mention the countless recipes gleaned and pilfered from slaves and servants. These (usually) wealthy women continued to profit off of unpaid labor, if not monetarily then by reputation at least. When Abby Fisher wrote/dictated “What Mrs. Fisher Knows about Old Southern Cooking,” she was not only leaving history with a precious document – she was claiming a legacy for herself.
I was recently delighted to come across a blog focused entirely on the recipes found in Mrs. Fisher’s cookbook. [2/8/19 – it has come to my attention that the blog is no longer up and is sadly not archived. I have replaced a few links with substitutes]
There is some good biographical background on Mrs. Fisher on Nicholas Mimms’ blog – including insight into her post-emancipation life in San Francisco, and even photos of her unmarked grave site.
If you enjoy Old Line Plate you will definitely want to follow ‘What Mrs. Fisher Knows.’
I reached out to Mimms for more information on the project:
I picked Mrs. Fisher because she was a Southern cook who ended up in San Francisco, and I’m from the South (from Georgia) and also found myself in San Francisco. So yeah, I guess our shared geography was one of the first things that first interested me in her book. I was actually looking to do Mary Randolph’s The Virginia House-Wife, but Mrs. Fisher’s book was much more manageable and her story (what we know of it at least) much more inspiring.
Abby Fisher was quite an impressive figure. To put her story into perspective: She was enslaved for the first ~30 years of her life. After emancipation, she moved across the country with her family (and remember, this was no easy task back then—the transcontinental railroad had only just been constructed, and the West was still pretty “Wild”). Within three years of arrival in San Francisco, she had earned several awards in recognition for her cooking ability, started her own business, and published one of the first cookbooks written by a Black woman. All of this, when slavery was a fresh memory. All of this, when women were relegated to the domestic sphere (and would not gain the right to vote for another 40 years).
Do you have any specific goal in mind for the blog?
I want to eventually cook through all of the recipes, modernize them with as little interference as possible, and put them all in one accessible place. I want Mrs. Fisher to get more recognition, since she’s too interesting and inspiring a person to be lost to time. Sadly, she’s buried in an unmarked grave in Colma, California. I’ve been to the plot where she and her husband are buried, but I wasn’t able to find a headstone.
While it was originally just gonna be a do-every-recipe-in-the-(historical)-book blog, I’ve become more and more interested in the person of Mrs. Abby Fisher herself, even more than the recipes. I’ve since added more “context” about her life, but it’s been really tough finding information about her at all. It’s still a work in progress, for sure…
Do you have any culinary background to help you adapt these old recipes which are sometimes rather vague?
I don’t have a culinary background. I have a bachelor’s degree in Economics and Chemistry, but I bake things for fun. Maybe the chemistry helps a bit, but I really have no training beyond watching Food Network. If a technical challenge comes up (like making pie dough or the sponge-and-dough method for making bread), I just try to research as much as possible.
Are there any other sources that you like to use for cross reference?
I mostly use Google to find as many comparable recipes to cross-reference. One historical book I find myself coming back to a lot is Mary Randolph’s The Virginia House-Wife; Or, Methodical Cook (1824), which is one of the definitive 19th-century Southern cookbooks. You can read the transcribed text here, and find PDFs for free online.
Many of the recipes in Abby Fisher’s book have a parallel in Mary Randolph’s, so it serves as a good foil. Randolph’s book is just as expansive as Mrs. Fisher’s, if not more, covering as wide-ranging dishes as British Charlotte Russe, to Spanish Ropa Vieja, to “Gumbo, A West India Dish.” Randolph’s book is also much longer, but to be fair, she had the privilege of being literate whereas Abby Fisher did not; Mrs. Fisher had to write her book 100% from memory.
The Carolina Housewife (1847) by Sarah Rutledge is another that I’ve looked at (full text here). Also, sites like The Spruce, Serious Eats, and King Arthur Flour’s blog have all been generally helpful.
What insight have you gained from personally cooking the recipes?
I think one of the main insights I’ve gotten is how many things can get lost in translation. Mrs. Fisher, in her introduction, says that she’s going to detail the recipes as much as possible, “so that a child can understand it” (her words, not mine). And to her credit, the book is clearly detailed, with relatively exact quantities and methods, especially for the time they were written in. Her “child” quote still taunts me after every failed recipe…
In the journey from Mrs. Fisher’s mind, to the transcriber’s words, to my modern translation, to my attempted cooking, these recipes go through three ‘transformations’ where things can go wrong:
First, the original recipe could be transcribed incorrectly (She was illiterate, so her recipe book is actually transcribed from her words, and the transcriber’s pen may have missed certain instructions). Some recipes are very obviously mis-transcribed, like her Ginger Cookie dough that is just a dry powder (not enough liquid!).
Second, there could be differences in the ingredients and technology used now and used then; I try to account for these differences in my modern translations, but I’m definitely missing things. For example, every time cornmeal gets involved, the batter gets really dry, so I figure the cornmeal back then was definitely more coarsely ground than today’s “fine” grind.
And finally, I could just be botching the darned thing. I’ve definitely curdled eggs, mishandled dough, and overbaked cakes along the way, even in recipes that 100% should work.
So yeah, a lot of the recipes looked pretty good on paper, and only after trying them out, you see all the places they could be going wrong, whether it’s the recipe itself, the ingredients, or your clumsy hand.
Recipe #1 from Mrs. Fisher’s book
Have any of the recipes you’ve tried so far been particularly delicious or challenging?
One of my favorite recipes so far was her no-churn vanilla ice cream recipe. It’s a frozen combination of soft meringue and whipped cream, which I found odd, but it tasted just like some modern ice creams. Actually, it tasted mostly like those cheap artificial vanilla ice creams that are thickened with guar gum or carrageenan or whatever, but still delicious! And Mary Berry (of British Bake-Off fame) has a very similar no-churn ice cream recipe, so you know it’s good.
Her molasses-heavy ginger cake is also delicious (though the method is in a weird order), as well as her sweet potato pie, which isn’t flavored with typical “pumpkin pie spices” but with orange peel and juice. All the ones I thought were unqualified successes I gave a “recommended” tag on the website. The others aren’t quite there, either because something got lost in translation and the recipe isn’t too good, or I just failed colossally in making it. They could still be worth a try!
As for challenging recipes, I guess the Sally Lund recipe took me a few attempts. Sally Lunn is a no-knead, overnight-rising bread that originated in Bath, England and eventually made its way to the Southern colonies. Because it is (relatively) no-knead, I’ve been having difficulty with the final texture… I keep getting a soda bread-like, crumbly inside that tastes okay, but not as buttery and moist as I’d hoped for.
And don’t get me started on her popover (“Breakfast Cream Cake”) recipe…
To accompany this post, I attempted one of the recipes that Mimms has already completed. I can’t resist a good “what in the heck…?” recipe and so I went straight for “Cheese Pudding,” a baked casserole of shredded apple and cheese. The formula is reminiscent of Pineapple Casserole.
I actually like the combination of cheddar cheese and apples so I went in that direction. I added a grated shallot which is not inauthentic if you consider this a savory dish. I also used pepper-jack which I’m pretty sure did NOT exist in 1881 (see? the past wasn’t that great!)
After eating some very custard-y servings as pictured here, I stirred in another egg and baked the dish a little while longer, because certain household members couldn’t hang with the texture.
As a sweet dish, this could be made with a soft cottage type cheese. But where’s the adventure in that?
Somewhere along one of my rambling internet research expeditions, Google Books’ agonizing snippet view gave me a glimpse of an interesting cookbook. The title alone hints at its vintage: “America Cooks: Favorite Recipes from 48 States.”
When I got my hands on a copy my first impression was that, at 986 pages, this was a huge book. Encyclopedic, almost. Of course I flipped straight to the Maryland section. Some of it was contributed by Frederick Philip Stieff himself. What really intrigued me was the writing. It’s a style lost to time, one I can best describe as “post-vaudeville, tongue-in-cheek conversational.” When I found another book by the authors, entitled “10,000 Snacks,” I was not surprised to find contributions by H.L. Mencken, Gypsy Rose Lee and Bernard Sobel.
So who were the authors? “The Browns: Cora, Rose and Bob.” The Mother, Son & Daughter-in-Law trio published over a dozen cookbooks and I began to collect them.
Many months later I returned to my research on the Browns and was surprised to find that a biography had been written about Bob Brown. As it turns out, in addition to globe-trotting and collaborating on the cookbooks, Brown was a poet, a radical, a pulp fiction writer under editor H.L. Mencken, and the inventor of a hypothetical machine that foretold the e-reader.
I reached out to the biographer, who is a UMBC professor, to ask for a little more detail on the author of these quirky cookbooks.
Can you, for the readers (cookbooks not being the sole focus of your book), put the cookbooks in context of Brown’s career – e.g. what might have brought him to enter that field?
Robert Carlton Brown, who later published as Bob Brown, and his mother Cora, had been interested in cooking, cuisine, and fine wines since they spent a year in New Orleans in 1912. They collected recipes and stories for many years afterward.
In 1926, the Browns (Bob and Rose) sold their international business newsletter business (with editions in Brazil, Mexico, and England); and the profits allowed Bob, Rose, Cora, and Bob’s son to travel the world for two years starting from their home in Brazil. In Africa, Asia, and Europe they collected many more recipes and stories. Even with all these recipes, they did not think to publish a cookbook. After the start of the Great Depression, they needed to publish cookbooks and party guides to make money.
The most successful cookbook of the 30 they published was “Cooking With Wine”, which was responsible for making wine legitimate for middle-class families and not just winos.
The Wine Cook Book (1945 edition)
In the biography, there is mention of some intrigue about Communist sympathies betrayed in the “Most for Your Money” cookbook, which of course seems somewhat far-fetched. But do you believe there is any influence of Brown’s politics on the cookbooks or have any examples of such?
When the Browns returned to the United States in 1932, they were in desperate need to make money, and they also worked to organize writers to get better deals for their work; Bob and Rose also went to live on a commune. The commune was affiliated with a labor college in Arkansas called Commonwealth College, and Bob and Rose taught there for a couple of years. The college had summer tours to the Soviet Union, which the Browns led. The college was threatened to be shut down because of scandalous behavior of the students especially women wearing pants, but the Browns helped start a letter writing campaign that included their celebrity friends, and it took years for the Arkansas legislature to close the college down. The Browns were not members of the communist party, but since before World War I, they were sympathetic to the democratic socialist ideals (Bob staged fund raising parties at New York City’s Webster Hall to help a radical magazine in 1916); if they were alive today, they would support Bernie Sanders, who hardly seems like the threat the “Red scare” suggested when the Brown’s cookbook was published by the Consumers Union, and which one reviewer worried that it was a way to put “Reds in your kitchen.” They were socialists, but they were also trying to make a living by publishing cookbooks.
Most for Your Money Cook Book (1938)
Have you ever tried any of the recipes? Do you have a favorite of the cookbooks?
One of Bob Brown’s great-grandchildren made a short film about the Browns and in it, she is listing the ingredients and showing someone (playing the role of Bob) cooking. I have not tried the recipes but I would be thrilled if someone would, and then post pictures and descriptions of the results. The recipes are a bit more decadent than today’s cookbooks with plenty of butter and booze.
Do you think the publication of those books changed the course of Brown’s life/career subsequently in any consequential way?
Oh my — yes, definitely. They would have starved without the revenue from those cookbooks. Even with the income, Bob was struggling financially in the last years of his life after Rose had passed away. The Browns’ often hilarious and rich stories are in the cookbooks, and in my biography of Bob Brown, I tried to include as many as possible, but there are more. Because they needed money, we got to tag along with them in adventures in eating, traveling, and living in more than a 100 cities around the world.
10,000 Snacks (1937)
Brown’s mother Cora seems like an interesting woman in her own right and it is interesting that he would choose to live/work with her later on in his career, do you have any additional insight/commentary on that?
After both his older brother and father died, Bob was Cora’s only surviving child (Bob’s other siblings had also died as very young children or as babies). So, Cora threw her energies into Bob’s career. He supported her throughout his long career, and he put up funds for her to start a restaurant in New York City in 1915. She wrote for the pulp magazines and was a part of the family enterprise to write cookbook after cookbook. She worried about Bob’s drinking especially during their world travels, and eventually, Bob stopped drinking completely because it was making him ill.
For someone like Brown who spent their early career cranking out pulp by the mile, how do you distinguish his sincere pursuits versus ‘just paying the bills?’
That seemingly easy question highlights a dilemma writers often face. If the Browns were alive today, they no doubt would have a cooking blog, maybe try to start a restaurant, and pitch an idea for a cooking show. They would also work to protect writers’ pay for work against those who expect everyone to work for free online. Bob published at least 8 experimental books of poetry; those were passionate and sincere pursuits, but even then he had to sell some copies to allow him to publish another volume. In reading the cookbooks and “The Amazing Adventures of Bob Brown: A Real-Life Zelig of the 20th Century” you can see the joie de vivre in the Browns’ lives, the fun of their parties, and the luxuriousness of their cooking, drinking, and partying. They were radical libertines and amazingly productive writers! The world was more fun with the Browns, and if the fun put food on the table all the better; as the title of one of Bob’s books exclaims: You Gotta Live!
